Leaving Time(76)

The thing is, I don’t have a great track record with that.

So there I was, holding the phone, and before I knew it, I was asking Serenity Jones, the so-called lapsed psychic, to come with me on a fact-finding mission to Gordon’s Wholesale Produce Market. It wasn’t until after she agreed, with game-show-contestant enthusiasm, to pick me up and be my de facto partner that I understood why she was the one I’d reached out to. It wasn’t that I thought she would actually be helpful in my investigation. It was because Serenity knew how it felt not to be able to live with yourself if you didn’t right what you had done wrong.

Now, an hour later, we’re in her little sardine can of a car, driving to the edge of Boone, where Gordon’s Wholesale has been in existence for as long as I can remember. It is the kind of place that sells mangoes in the dead of winter, when the whole world is dying for a mango and the only place growing them is Chile or Paraguay. Their summertime strawberries are the size of a newborn’s head.

I go to turn on the radio, just because I don’t know what to say, and find a little paper elephant folded and tucked into the corner.

“She made that,” Serenity says, and she doesn’t have to say Jenna’s name for me to understand.

The paper slips out of my fingers, like a Chinese football. It arcs in a perfect loop into Serenity’s massive purple purse, which gapes open on the console between us like Mary Poppins’s carpetbag. “You heard from her yet today?”

“No.”

“Why do you think that is?”

“Because it’s eight A.M. and she’s a teenager.”

I squirm in the passenger seat. “You don’t think it was because I was an * yesterday?”

“After ten or eleven A.M., it will be. But right now I think it’s because she’s sleeping like any other kid during summer vacation.”

Serenity flexes her hands on the steering wheel, and I find myself staring—not for the first time—at the furry cover she has stretched over it. It’s blue, and has googly eyes and white fangs. It looks a little like the Cookie Monster, if the Cookie Monster had swallowed a steering wheel. “What the hell is that thing?” I ask.

“Bruce,” Serenity answers, as if it’s a stupid question.

“You named your steering wheel?”

“Honey, the longest relationship I’ve ever had is with this car. Given that your closest companion has the first name of Jack and the last name of Daniel’s, I don’t think you’re in a position to judge.” She smiles sunnily at me. “Damn, I’ve missed this.”

“Bickering?”

“No, police work. It’s like we’re Cagney and Lacey, except you’re better looking than Tyne Daly.”

“I’m not touching that one,” I mutter.

“You know, in spite of what you think, what you and I do isn’t all that different.”

I burst out laughing. “Yeah, except for that desire for measurable scientific evidence thing that I have.”

She ignores me. “Think about it: We both know what questions to ask. We both know what questions not to ask. We are fluent in body language. We live and breathe intuition.”

I shake my head. There’s no way what I do could be compared to what she does. “There’s nothing paranormal about my job. I don’t get a vision, I focus on what’s right in front of me. Detectives are observers. I see a person who can’t look me in the eye and I try to figure out whether it’s grief or shame. I pay attention to what makes someone cry. I listen, even when no one’s speaking words,” I say. “Did it ever occur to you that there is no such thing as clairvoyant? That maybe psychics are just really good at detective work?”

“Or maybe you’ve got that backward. Maybe the reason a good detective can read his subjects is because he’s a little bit psychic.”

She pulls into the Gordon’s Wholesale parking lot. “This is a fishing expedition,” I tell Serenity, quickly lighting a cigarette as I get out of the car and she hurries to catch up to me. “And we are going to reel in Gideon Cartwright.”

“You don’t know where he went after the sanctuary closed?”

“I know he stuck around long enough to help move the elephants to their new home. And after that … your guess is as good as mine,” I say. “I assume that all the caregivers took turns coming here to pick up produce. If Gideon had been planning to run away with Alice, maybe he let something slip in conversation.”

“You don’t know if the same employees are around ten years later—”

“I don’t know that they’re not, either,” I point out. “Fishing, remember? You never know what you’re going to pull up when you reel in. Just go along with what I say.”

I grind out my cigarette beneath my heel and walk into the produce stand. It’s a glorified wooden shack staffed by lots of twenty-somethings who sport dreadlocks and Birkenstocks, but there’s one old man who is stacking tomatoes into a giant pyramid. It’s pretty damn impressive, and at the same time, there’s a perverse part of me that wants to take the one from the very bottom corner of the pile and send them all tumbling.

One of the employees, a girl with a nose ring, smiles at Serenity as she hauls a big basket of sweet corn toward the cash register. “Let me know if you need any help,” she says.